1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a film laminating apparatus and method for a flat or curved plate member, and particularly, to an apparatus and method for is laminating a film having a predetermined pattern or texture on a surface of a plate member having an arbitrary shape.
2. Description of the Conventional Art
A cabinet forming the external shape of a home appliance such as a washing machine or refrigerator is processed to have a predetermined shape by performing a machining process such as pressing or deep drawing on a panel made of carbon steel, stainless steel, etc.
Various colors may be applied to the cabinet so that the cabinet has a beautiful exterior appearance. The cabinet may entirely have one color or may have a color of two or more tones so as to look more luxurious. A method of coating pigments with two colors on the surface of a metal panel may be considered so that the surface of the metal panel has various colors. However, the method is not used for luxury products due to low durability and poor quality of exterior appearance.
A method of laminating a film having a specific pattern or metallic texture on the surface of a panel may be used as another method. The method can provide the panel with a texture similar to that of an actual metal material, but has a problem in that its application range is limited. That is, in case of a home appliance, a panel has not only an irregular surface such as a protruding portion or concave portion but also various shape including a flat surface, a curved surface, etc. Therefore, it is not easy to uniformly laminate a film on the panel having an arbitrary shape.
That is, as shown in FIG. 1, a conventional film laminating apparatus 10 is configured by receiving a film supplied from a film supply roll 12 for supplying the is film to be laminated, laminating the film on a surface of a plate member using a pair of pressing rolls 14 and then cutting the film to a predetermined size using a cutter. A protective film laminated on the rear of the film is wound around a winding roll 18 after the film is delaminated from the protective film.
The plate member is washed by sequentially passing through a water supply nozzle 20, a brush 22, a moisture removal device 24 and a dryer 26, and then transferred to the pressing roll 14 by a roller 30.
The film laminating apparatus continuously laminates the film on the plate member, so that it is possible to uniformly maintain quality and to improve productivity. However, the film laminating apparatus is limited to the case where the member on which the film is to be laminated is a plate member.
Therefore, the film should be manually laminated on a panel having a curved surface or protruding portion. In this case, it is highly likely that a variation in quality may occur, and the productivity is not high.